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Paulo Freire had developed new techniques for training adults to read and write, but his hopes of employing them to transform his native land were frustrated by the military coup of 1964. The experience of exile that resulted from the coup, however, opened up new opportunities for him. In Chile, the recently inaugurated administration of Eduardo Frei made popular education part of a larger Christian Democratic state project of promoting land reform and the enlargement of what we now call civil society. Central to Frei’s vision was a plan to eradicate illiteracy.1 The Frei administration sought both to liberate and to control, and at its best and worst, it exemplified the promise and the contradictions of 1960s reformism. Freire, Frei, and others engaged in the process of encouraging social transformation wanted to change the consciousness of the Chilean campesinos. Given the strengths and weaknesses of the Chilean social and political system, this created the potential both for furthering a paternalistic relationship between the government and the governed and for promoting changes that went beyond the boundaries of the permissible. Moreover, it awakened the consciousness of more than those it specifically targeted, radicalizing, at times, the very state agents who took part in the program of social transformation, seemingly even Freire himself, while inspiring more conservative elements in Chilean society to regroup and challenge the Christian Democrats in the 1970 presidential election. Chile, a country with a population of roughly 8.2 million at the time Freire arrived, is spread out across 2,600 miles, although the majority of its population lived in the central valley. More than 70 percent of the population in the Three / Reformist Chile, Peasant Consciousness, & the Meaning of Christian Democracy, 1964–1969 62 r efor mist chile 1960s was urban. Most of the population was white, roughly one-third was mestizo, and only about 3 percent was purely indigenous. Chilean social realities , or at least myths of racial homogeneity, did not force Freire to emphasize race in Chile. One-fifth of the population could usefully be described as middle class. Chilean democracy had evolved over time, with urban workers and miners becoming integrated into the political system, but not without occasional setbacks and perhaps at times at what must have seemed a glacial rate. Electoral changes beginning in 1958 had upset the traditional, to a large degree still oligarchical system and created opportunities for the Left and for adventurous reformists like those represented by the Partido Democrata Cristiana (Christian Democratic Party, pdc). Only the literate could vote, but the vast majority of the population (as opposed to only 60 percent of the population in Brazil at the time) was literate.2 Paulo Freire’s experience in Chile in adult literacy education from 1964 to 1969 represents a fruitful period in his life. As important as Freire’s previous work in Brazil had been, it was during his Chilean exile that he became a figure of importance throughout Latin America. To understand how Freire became so central to the international debate over the importance of literacy in social transformation, one must examine him and his work within the context of the larger Christian Democratic reformist project, which he aided and eventually came to criticize. The Frei administration not only could boast significant achievements in enhancing civil society, but it also created problematic political dynamics that would be exacerbated during Salvador Allende’s abbreviated term in office. To place Freire within the Chilean political context, one has to look closely at his allies in the administration, most particularly Jacques Chonchol, Freire’s boss in the Ministry of Agriculture’s Instituto del Desarrollo Agropecuario (Institute of Farming and Livestock Development, indap) and a controversial figure inside and outside of the administration , and the much lesser known Waldemar Cortés Carabantes, who was in charge of the education ministry’s adult literacy campaign. Chonchol, a technocrat and devout Catholic, had worked for the agriculture ministry in previous Chilean administrations before going to Cuba to work as a Food and Agriculture Organization (fao) adviser on agrarian reform from 1959 to 1961. To understand the relationship between literacy training and the broader process of social transformation, one must examine the tensions within the pdc and in Chilean society as a whole regarding the direction and the pace of reform. One must also examine the question of the degree to which “consciousness” was being changed, and whose consciousness was [3.138.102.178] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...

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